


From your cadaver flowers will grow

by Baryshnikov



Series: Where Monsters lie [10]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blood and Gore, Corpse Desecration, Flowers, Language of Flowers, M/M, Mild Necrophilia, Murder, Obsession, POV Second Person, Regret, Shrine building, Stream of Consciousness, True Love, Unhealthy Relationships, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-28 15:46:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17790218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: You still killed him though, didn't you?





	From your cadaver flowers will grow

**Author's Note:**

> From Tom's perspective

You are lying in bed beside him. It's romantic really, the two of you together again. Your hands wrapped together, and your hearts connected in a way you don’t quite understand. The room is so quiet this early in the morning, so early that the sun has not yet risen, and it is just you and him, lying here together in the pre-dawn grey. As you lie there staring at the ceiling you can’t quite believe that you have killed him. A little part of you is horrified, disgusted even at what you’ve done, and equally appalled at how easy it was to do it. How when the moment came, and he was really nothing more than a child, just a frightened little boy who wasn’t sure whether he wanted to die, it was so easy to slide the knife into him. It was so easy to push it deep under his skin and into his heart, so easy to slit him open and watch all the prettiness ooze out. He was contented in that moment when his heart stopped beating, and you think it made it that much sweeter, to have him open and vulnerable just for you, exposed and defenceless, weaker than he’d ever been before, giving you so much. 

You still killed him though, didn’t you?

You don’t want to raise the sheet and see the carnage you created beneath, see how the feeling of taking just overwhelmed you, and that you took far more than you deserved. You took everything from him, just because you wanted to, just to remind him that you could. As you lie beside him now, you can feel his eyes on you, unblinking now that he is dead. You pull the duvet up over his head, you don’t want to see, you don’t want to be reminded of what you did. Hiding his face does not stop it being real though. As if to emphasise it, a circle of red blooming like great flowers is slowly soaking up through the white. It reminds you of what you did to him long before you killed him. How you spread across the blankness of his mind, slowly dripping poison down his throat, and watched your infection spread through him. As much as it should have been outrageous what you did, you won’t say you didn’t enjoy it, because you did. You loved it so very much, loved to watch him floundering, struggling, drowning. You loved the look in his eyes as he reached out for you, how he reached out in desperation and you just stepped further away. You led him out into the open waters, out to places he could never hope to navigate, you made sure that he was predestined to die, so could you really say that it was his fault he drowned? You do anyway. You blame him. He should have been able to cope. Should have been able to handle everything you gave to him. 

You still killed him though, didn’t you?

You want to make him beautiful. Tell him you’re sorry for what you did, sorry that you took what wasn’t yours to take because you are sorry. So sorry that he is dead, and you are alone. You cannot truly feel sorry for _him_ though, there is nothing to worry him in his death, and it would have come too soon anyway. You merely sped up the process, let him die while his mind was still so innocent of all the darker things this world had to offer. Let him die a passionate, happy, death, with you by his side, all because he loved you, and now that you are without him, you think perhaps you loved him a little too. That makes you confused because you never planned to love him, never thought that you’d feel anything akin to affection for someone like him. But here is the feeling. It bubbles up through your stomach and curls itself around your heart like a snake. A constrictor slowly squeezing and squeezing until it physically hurts. You hate him, a little more then, that even after he is dead, he still manages to do things to you, to make you feel things that are sickening and infuriating and weak. He has no right to do that to you because it makes you feel something you don’t like, a feeling that clogs your throat and burns your tongue. He makes you feel ashamed, feel guilty, he makes you regret what you did to him, and you don’t want to feel that because he _had_ to die. He had to, that was his singular purpose, to be born and to die, and he had no right to make you feel like you do. 

You still killed him though, didn’t you?

Just because he is dead, it does not mean you won’t kiss him. It doesn’t mean you won’t press your lips against his and imagine that he is still alive. He is cold by now. Cold and dead and stuck inside your heart. It's not that you don’t like him dead. You do. It's just that you wish for something else, something that doesn’t make any sense, something you’ve never really felt before. So, you kiss him harder, and you taste death, savour it on your tongue and swallow it down. It feels good to know you were the one to kill him, it was only right, no one else could have given him exactly what he wanted, played the game of love quite as exquisitely as you did. You doubt there was anyone else in the entire world who could have swept him up like you did, no one else could have spun him such pretty spiderwebs, wrapped him in silky lies and left him to die so callously. No one else would have treated him like you did, and now you find yourself wishing that he was still alive, still begging you, murmuring in your ear how brilliant you are. He always did that, no matter what you did to him, he always made you feel impossibly good.

You still killed him though, didn’t you?

He deserves more than you can give him, more beauty in his death than you can find in your entire life. He deserves to flourish, but your world is made of decay, a hollow rot that goes so deep no matter what he did, he wouldn’t get it out of you. He deserves so much, but you will give him what you can, however little it is. Flowers are what you will give him because flowers can say the things you couldn’t, and you still can’t, say with your own mouth.   
As the sun rises, a pale haze spilling through the glass, you split him further open. His body is as cold as his mouth was, and his organs feel wrong when all the blood begins to coagulate against your fingers. Bodies don’t feel right when they’re dead. It doesn’t deter you though, you made him a promise, and you will fulfil it, it is what he deserves. You do not take him apart as such, only peel him back, revealing the last secret part of him, the one part he could never have shown you when he was still alive. You know you shouldn’t, but there is no one here to stop you, running your fingers through him, curling under his organs, feeling them give a little, scraping your nails along his bones, and wondering what grows inside. He is more beautiful on the inside than he ever was on the outside. There is a pull, a mesmerism dragging you closer to his skeleton, until your lying with your head against his flesh-stripped ribs, wishing you could bring him back. 

You still killed him though, didn’t you?

You give him flowers because flowers are beautiful. You lace those white ribs with pink carnations, you pull away his flesh so that they may twist in pretty patterns, a crochet masterpiece. Their petals feather out and add a beautiful blush to his skin that will turn blue before long. You do not think of when he will rot away, and truly leave you all alone. As you entwine those flowers with his body, you think of what they mean, _I will never forget you_ , that is what you whisper to yourself when you run your fingertips over the ruffles. However hard you tried, you could never forget him. You deliberately left the centre of his ribs so bare because you know you want to feel his heart and his lungs and all the things his ribcage is supposed to protect. Even you wince at the cracking of cartilage and splintering of bone, but while it is horrible, it gives you what you want.   
You touch his lungs, running your finger along the smooth exterior. You are ever so gentle when you stitch long strips of lavender into those lungs. Filling every bronchiole with a stalk and hoping they will grow. You want him to suffocate on his love, suffocate on his excruciating affection, suffocate on his endless yearning. You want him to choke on the _devotion_ that is so gorgeous neither of you can breathe. The purple looks pretty against the red, adds contrast, and depth, so pleasing to the eye, especially when the gleams of the sun catch the edges of the petals, and have his lungs burn bright with purple fire.   
From there you dip your hands lower, sliding you through all the parts that people aren’t supposed to show each other until your fingers reach his intestines. You weave into those intestines, violets as if they were a parasite. Sometimes you think he was, a parasite in your life, always distracting you from what was truly important, taking up too much of your time and never giving anything back. He has given his dues now, given you everything you could have ever hoped for, and then a little more. There are so many little violets now in his body, such a vivid, violent purple, so stark against the skin you couldn’t quite bear to pull back any further. You hope he doesn’t mind, that he understands the message, how simply _in love_ you were with him, though you’d never use those words exactly.   
As the sun rises higher and the colours intensify, you draw circles in the air around your flowers, tracing them, until you run out. His stomach is bare, and it shouldn’t be. It feels wrong to cut his stomach open and fill it with lilacs, so imbued with pride, and purple, and _passion_. Somehow it feels good to put into flowers the ache that you are feeling cut into your own stomach. The tiny flowers remind you of an infestation, being overwhelmed, swamped by a hunger, that pathological sickness spreading. He told you once it felt like you were inside him, scraping at his stomach, begging him to let you out. He said it was the most wonderful feeling in the world, and you hope that was true because now your passions will forever be in his stomach, and you’ll never forget how he made you feel.

You still killed him though, didn’t you? 

Although you don’t want to, you cut out his heart, it is easier like that. Easier to intertwine it with red carnations and gentle peonies if his heart is in your hand. The peonies are so large and pale and striking. Brutal and violent in such a delicate way, demanding attention and filling your heart with such a feeling you fear it might burst. You hope he understands how angry you are, angry at what he did to you, at what he made you do to him. Your silent tears that you’ll never admit to anyone, embed themselves in the petals, never to be seen by another soul, no one else deserves to see, least of all him. Though he makes you want to tear him apart, your hands shake you thread red carnations into the hollow valves. If you could you’d fill his heart with soil and grow such beautiful things. But you can’t. Your hands are not made for growing, you know that now without a doubt, your hands are made for killing. You murmur that to him as place the heart back between his cracked ribs, murmur that and how your _heart aches_ for him, aches to have him back, breathing by your side.   
The last thing you do is kiss him again, kiss him and pull his mouth wide open. You fill it with purple hyacinths, flowers of gods, and watch how they curl over his lips just a touch as if they know their vase is vassal of death. _Please forgive me_. That is what they beg. That is what you beg. That is what you pray. That is what you want more than anything. For him to forgive you, for him understand that this _had_ to be done. You want him to love you for what you did before, during and after his death. 

You still killed him though, didn’t you?

When you lie with him, wondering what you’ve done, your fingers are looped around flowers, embedded up to your knuckles in beauty and death, splendour and gore, petals and blood. These worlds, once contraries, are now so grotesquely intertwined that they can no longer be separated. You have made a new behemoth, a monstrous distortion that should never have come to light. You don’t care anymore. There is a small part of you that has died with him. A small part that will rot as he does, but you hope that the flowers: the carnations and the peonies, the lilacs and the lavender, the violets and the hyacinths will take root in his veins. That from his body life will be born and he will live again. You are a monster to have killed the thing you loved the most. But you think you have exalted him in his death, venerated him and honoured him in a way that no one else could have done. You wonder whether maybe, just maybe he can truly forgive you for what you did, though it continues to ricochet around your head:

You still killed him though, didn’t you?

**Author's Note:**

> My attempt at writing something sweet for Valentine's day didn't turn out to be quite as sweet, but you know... I hope it wasn't too bad.


End file.
